Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller The Anxious Generation has secured its place as one of the most-talked-about books of the year, even prompting politicians to take action and start advocating for phone-free schools. All across the country, people are responding to the overwhelming evidence that growing up in the virtual world is impairing kids in multiple ways, and living online isn’t good for anyone, regardless of their age.

Interestingly, Haidt includes a chapter in his book on spirituality. For Haidt, this means those aspects of life that lift us above the daily “x axis” of existence, like eating, sleeping, and arranging for one’s personal comfort, convenience, and pleasure. To live well, we need the spiritual. We need “transcendence” to cut through the merely physical part of our lives.

Some readers might find this surprising. Haidt is an atheist and the book is a work of social psychology, not religion. Nonetheless, Haidt finds the religious “impulse” a core element to what it means to be human, and that we ignore it at our own peril. What’s more, he believes what he calls “the phone-based” life is impairing our ability to connect to a sense of higher purpose and the sacred. Living on our phones cuts us off from the transcendent. “…I sometimes need words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being. This is one of those times,” Haidt writes in his chapter “Spiritual Elevation and Degradation.” (p. 201)

Learning to See the World

Haidt once his assigned his students in his class on Flourishing at New York University to go on a walk through the park in Greenwich Village and write what they saw. The caveat? They had to leave their phones behind. He notes that in all his many years of teaching, he’d never been so moved by what the students came up with. Probably because the responses arose straight from the soul! Students reported seeing trees, flowers, the sky, etc., in new ways that before they’d barely even noticed. When our heads are pointed down at our phones, we give less and less time to attend to the beauty found in nature. 

Haidt uses the evolutionary framework to explain his conclusions, including our draw towards the beautiful. “Humans evolved in nature,” Haidt writes. 

Our sense of beauty evolved to attract us to environments in which our ancestors thrived, such as grasslands with trees and water, where herbivores are plentiful, or the ocean’s edge, with its riche marine resources. The great evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson said that humans are ‘biophilic,’ by which he meant that humans have ‘the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.’ This is why people travel to wondrous natural destinations. It’s why the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park the way it is, with fields, lakes, and a small zoo where my children delighted in feeding sheep and goats.  

p. 214

Haidt goes on to explain how today, our natural impulse is to try and capture beautiful scenes on our phones, thereby diminishing the sense of awe we might have gotten if we had just ogled at it and forgot about our devices. As the punk rock band Relient K sings in their song “Look On Up”: “It’s time I put down my devices and I start to live my life.” 

Reducible to Evolution? 

While I love Haidt’s emphasis and regard for the beautiful, I do question the power of his argument about beauty as a remnant of our collective survival instinct. For me, the notion that my draw towards the beautiful is based not on a spiritual reality outside of the material realm but a simple drive to survive seems to undercut the power of the experience. It’s like reducing the love a man has for his wife as a chemical reaction. Surely, the chemicals are involved, but no one wants to reduce something as powerful as romantic love to brain activity that doesn’t mean anything beyond itself. I want the beauty of the forest to actually be beautiful, not just signal a primordial drive to forage and hunt. 

Haidt anticipates his critics from his more religious-minded friends under the heading in the chapter titled “The God-Shaped Hole.” Haidt actually believes there is such a hole, and when we don’t fill it with religion, we’ll use all sorts of garbage (such as social media) to take its place. He writes, 

There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage. That has been true since the beginning of the age of mass media, but the garbage pumps got 100 times more powerful in the 2010s.”

p. 216

While Haidt might differ on the source and motivation for the transcendent, he passionately affirms its place in our lives. It’s time to leave the phone behind on occasion, look at a tree, and see what happens.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.